Pangolin, p.31
Pangolin, page 31
‘No name tags, anything like that?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did you get a description of the man who attacked her?’
‘Well, that’s the bad news. I’ve got a dozen people who saw him quite clearly, and he doesn’t match up with the stuff you put out on the sailor. He doesn’t fit the clothes either. The witnesses put him at five-nine or -ten, medium build, brown hair, brown eyes.’
‘Neighbours know anything?’ McNair asked.
‘We’re working our way through them. You know what it’s like in these crowded blocks. The impression we’ve got so far is that, yes, the girl was living with a gwai-lo, but nobody seems to have caught a glimpse of him.’
‘Then all I can do for now is get a couple of our own fingerprint men down to check the place over for us. Meanwhile, perhaps you’d buzz me as soon as they’re ready to let us talk to the girl.’
32
The rain began just a few minutes before Pritchard and Baxter got to Hebe Haven. It did not announce itself with a few preliminary drops but fell out of the sky in a sudden torrent, drumming on the roof of the car, sheeting across the windscreen. Baxter drove at five miles an hour, blinking worriedly past the slashing blades of the wipers as they approached Pak Sha Wan, searching for the turnoff to the jetty.
‘Alan, I’m telling you this is crazy. This is the first sign, this rain. Then the wind will get up. It’ll blow harder and harder. To go out in this is lunacy!’
‘Would you rather wait for the cops to come knocking on our doors, picking us off one by one? We’ve still got one trump card: Kiley. We’re going to hang on to him until we’re ready to let him go. We’re going to see the Project through, Bax.’
‘And get ourselves drowned while we’re about it?’
‘It’s only a tropical storm, not a typhoon.’
‘At the moment. And it’s moving parallel to our course to Luzon. Do you know what that means? Even if we don’t get anywhere near the middle of it, it means winds of thirty or forty knots, waves fifteen feet high.’
‘You’ve said often enough that the junk is sturdy, that she’ll take anything the weather throws at her.’
‘Yes, but can we take it? I’m nothing but a bloody weekend sailor. I wish I’d never let you talk me into this, Alan, I really do. You should have heard Liz kick up. She thinks I’m out of my mind. And I mean, hell, when am I going to see her and the kid again?’
‘You can send for them, once things cool off.’
‘But where can we go, Alan? Who would have us, any of us, now?’
‘You just wait till we get our five million bucks. That sort of money can buy a lot of protection in Asia.’
They bumped off the road down the track—already turned into a mudslide by the rain—to the jetty. In the light from the headlamps they could see the boatboy’s sampan, still tied up where they had left it on returning from Basalt Island the previous morning. That seemed an age ago now, in a time of tranquillity before this nightmare had descended.
Rain lashed down unrelentingly. Baxter doused his lights. They got out of the car and ran down the jetty and were sodden even before they scrambled into the sampan, unhitched the painter and began to row to the Lady Belinda.
On board the junk there was more shelter—the cockpit and its instruments were protected by glass screens and a coach roof that could be slid open in good weather—but before they could take advantage of it they had to secure the sampan, start the engines, and cast off the mooring lines. Before moving out of the harbour Baxter insisted on going down to the saloon and putting on his life jacket. He returned to the cockpit wearing it, his stout frame padded out so that he looked like a pouter pigeon, and busied himself with the controls and the instruments arrayed on a wide sill around the wheel of the junk. He got the engines running within a few seconds, then started up the rotating weather screen that would enable him to see through the driving rain. He switched on the echo sounder and the Decca 606 radar scanner, and finally the navigation lights.
‘No lights,’ Pritchard said. ‘At least, not until we’ve cleared Hong Kong waters.’
‘It’s a regulation. If the marine police get curious about us they’ll stop us for sure.’
‘If the marine police have any sense they’ll stay in harbour on a night like this.’
‘What if they pick us up on radar? I mean, it’s going to look pretty curious, a vessel heading out into the teeth of a storm.’
‘We’ve left enough trouble behind us, Bax, don’t go anticipating more. Anyway, I’m hoping we’ll be well out to sea before anybody back there wakes up to the fact that we’re missing.’
The Lady Belinda picked her way slowly out between the other boats at their moorings. Baxter had been in and out of this harbour a hundred times, and with the weather screen to help him see through the rain, together with a little moonlight filtering through the cloud, he was able to negotiate a safe passage to the mouth of the bay. Once there, he set the junk on a course of 135 degrees, which would give her a clear run all the way to the southern tip of Basalt.
He punched the two throttle leavers up to full speed and the Lady Belinda gradually gained momentum, ploughing on through the rain towards an utterly black horizon. There was still no wind to speak of. The time was two thirty-five in the morning.
At ten past three McNair got the call from the fingerprint section of the Identification Bureau that he’d been awaiting for nearly two hours. The delay was frustrating but understandable. The two fingerprint men and the photographer he’d sent to the building where the girl had been attacked had been told to take a random sampling of prints found all round the room. In a domestic environment these ran into many thousands. The team had been dusting and photographing frantically; the exposed film had been sent back in relays to the fingerprint section to be developed, enlarged, examined and referred to the indexing system.
‘Chief?’ said the lab technician. ‘I think we’ve finally got something that matches. Two clear thumbprints, taken off a kettle in the kitchen and a door handle on a cupboard.’
‘Whose?’ McNair hardly dared to ask.
‘No one on the regular index. Someone whose name you sent us this afternoon. Someone called Lindsay, Patrick Lindsay.’
‘Quinn!’ McNair exclaimed. ‘Seymour Bloody Quinn!’
‘That’s not the name we have here. It’s Lindsey, L-I-N—’
‘Thanks,’ said McNair, and banged down the phone. Boyd walked in at that moment, freshly washed, shaved and changed after three hours’ sleep.
‘What’s doing, Mac?’
‘Sounds like your public appeal might have worked after all, sir. Not quite the way we expected, but perhaps it’s paid off all the same.’ He picked up the phone again, and while he dialled the Wanchai CID number and waited for a reply, he explained briefly what had happened.
‘Looks as though the sailor was living with this girl, at least until recently,’ he concluded. ‘But judging by the description of the attacker, it wasn’t Quinn who came back to do her in.’
‘Who, then?’
‘Somebody close to him. Somebody who was afraid that the girl might respond to our appeal, that she’d come to us. The man has to be an accomplice. And that means your guess was right: they’re still here in Hong Kong—some of them, at least.’
The Australian detective came on the line. McNair said, ‘Ten out of ten for you, mate. The man who was living with the girl is the one we want. Any chance of talking to her yet?’
‘I’ve got a man sitting outside her ward at the hospital, waiting to do just that. She’s come round, partly anyway, but she’s pretty shattered, very confused. Has no clear recollection of what happened tonight. That’s normal in concussion cases, the doc up there tells me.’
‘We’re figuring on the attacker being an accomplice of Quinn’s. If she opened the door to him she had to know him. All I want is a name, one name.’
The rain ceased, as abruptly as it had begun, at twenty to four, just as Baxter and Pritchard were nosing the Lady Belinda in towards the Basalt Island coast. The thunderous drumming on the hull suddenly stopped; the hiss of rain on the sea all around them, which had obliterated every other sound, gave way to the ominous surge and slap of choppy little waves. Now they could appreciate how the wind had got up in the last hour—from a heavy near-calm to a stiff southwesterly breeze, force four and steadily strengthening. They had passed through the rainy front—a mere shower compared with what could yet be expected—and were now poised on the very edge of the tropical storm itself, its epicentre still two hundred wind-tom miles away across the Southern China Sea.
‘Lucky we set off when we did,’ Pritchard said. ‘In another hour we probably wouldn’t be able to make a landing.’
Baxter nodded absently, concentrating on the view ahead. Since they’d set off from Hebe Haven he had been growing steadily gloomier and more withdrawn. Afraid of the storm, Pritchard thought, and just plain worried about everything. Not that there wasn’t good reason for them all to be worried: it was just that Baxter was the type who would give up and lie down under it. Luckily he hadn’t been given the chance; it was too late to back out now. Like the rest of them, he was totally committed to the Project.
Taking advantage of the improved visibility now that the rain had stopped, Pritchard fetched Baxter’s high-powered torch from the saloon, left the cockpit and made his way forward to the prow of the junk. Cirrus clouds, like tufts of windblown wool, were scudding very fast across the face of the moon, giving enough light at intervals to allow him to see the dark outline of the island ahead. The wind dragged at him as he stood at the rail and signalled with a torch: one short, two long, one short, the Morse sign for P, the emergency signal. P for Pangolin, Project, Pritchard, it didn’t matter which as long as it was seen. A few minutes earlier Baxter had taken a fix from the radio beacons on Cape Collinson and High Island, which made the course they were steering now accurate to within a couple of hundred yards. But still they needed a visual signal to home in on if they were to run the junk straight into the little bay and avoid a risk of hitting a rock or going aground. Let’s hope the buggers are keeping a proper lookout, Pritchard thought, signalling a second time. They were supposed to spell each other on watch, but after the exhausting day they had had, it would be all too easy for them both to fall asleep at once.
By the time he had given a third signal and got no response, he was getting anxious. The junk must be less than a quarter mile off the coast now, with the wind and the following seas pushing her rapidly towards the shore, and he could still not make out the beach. Fong and Quinn were not expecting them till the following night; clearly they had not prepared themselves for a possible emergency.
Then he saw the signal: a single short flash, repeated after five seconds, then repeated again—close ahead, startlingly close. He ran back along the slippery deck to the cockpit.
‘Slow down!’ he said to Baxter. ‘Watch the light.’
The fat man throttled back to quarter speed. The junk slowed until the wind and the waves were doing most of the work, carrying her towards the lights. There were two of them now, one higher than the other, flashing at twenty-second intervals. Lining up on them, Baxter steered the junk gently into the very centre of the bay. Pritchard ran forward and let go the anchor. Baxter put the engines in reverse, letting the boat strain against the chain until he was sure the anchor was dug in. He cut the engines and the Lady Belinda came round sharply into the wind.
The two discs of torchlight had moved down from the high ground behind the pillbox on to the beach, and the beams were pointed out towards the junk.
‘Switch those bloody things off!’ Pritchard yelled, but his voice was lost to the wind. ‘Let’s go,’ he said impatiently to Baxter.
‘You take the sampan. I want to catch the four o’clock weather bulletin. And be quick, Alan: when we hit this storm I want to do it at sea, not inshore.’
Pritchard lowered the swimming steps, pulling the little boat round to them and climbed awkwardly down into it. He rowed rapidly to the shore, and in less than a minute Fong and Quinn were dragging the prow up on to the beach.
‘Man, what’s happened?’ the American demanded, even before Pritchard had hopped out on to the sand. ‘You got trouble?’
‘We’ve all got trouble. We’re getting out and taking Kiley with us, I’ll explain later.’
He turned to walk up the beach towards the pillbox. Quinn reached out a big paw, seized him by the shirt front and spun him round, bringing his face close to Pritchard’s.
‘Don’t hand me that shit. Bad news don’t take long to tell, and you got bad news stuck all over you like barnacles. What happened?’
Quinn’s face in the thin moonlight was set into hard, tired lines, his temper as frayed as Pritchard’s by the tension of waiting. Pritchard recognized suddenly that a critical moment had arrived for all of them, a choice between conflict and conciliation. They were going to need each other; there was no advantage, any longer, in playing the heavy in charge. He reached out a hand and gripped Quinn’s shoulder.
‘All right, sailor, but let’s make it quick. There’s a storm out there, moving in fast, and we’ve got to sail out into it. We’ve got to go, believe me. We’re rumbled. That’s to say, you’re rumbled, and the rest of us are going to follow soon.’
‘Rumbled?’ The American did not understand.
‘You haven’t heard any news broadcasts lately?’
‘I quit listening around ten. There was nothing new all day.’
‘Now there is. Your face has been all over the television screens. They’ve got you nabbed, and pretty soon they’re going to trace the rest of us through you, if they haven’t already. We’ve got to get out, and now. We haven’t lost yet: as long as we can make it to our rendezvous in the Philippines we’ll be okay. The Moros and Salim will protect us: they’ve got to, for their own sakes.’
‘How the fuck did they trace me?’
‘I don’t know.’ Pritchard had already decided he wouldn’t mention the Canny business, not now anyway, with tempers so volatile. ‘The point is we have to go, and I mean this minute.’
‘Out into that? Why can’t we hole up here for another day?’
‘Because,’ said Pritchard, restraining the almost irresistible urge, even now, to be sarcastic, ‘because through you they are going to learn that Bax had a boat out at Hebe Haven, and they are going to check on that boat and find it’s gone. And then, perhaps even with a storm going, provided it’s not too severe, they can send out aerial reconnaissance, and how would you like them to find the junk riding at anchor out here, off an uninhabited island, and send the marine police boats in? If we can get just ten miles south of here, preferably before dawn, we’ll be out of their territorial limits where they can’t chase us.’
The wind had veered slightly, perhaps momentarily, to the south, and it suddenly flung a gust of fine sand into their faces. Quinn at last let go his grip on Pritchard’s shirt front. He said, ‘They got a navy, don’t they? They don’t have to stick to territorial waters.’
‘They’ve got five patrol boats that are no more seaworthy than that junk. As long as we get a head start on them we’re laughing.’
Quinn turned uncertainly to Fong, who as usual was hovering on the fringe of the discussion, a few yards up the beach. ‘What do you think?’
Fong, characteristically, paused before committing himself. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘there is no choice. We must go.’
‘Okay,’ said Quinn. ‘What do we do?’
‘Get Kiley out, that’s all.’ Pritchard’s role as leader reasserted itself without his needing to make the point. ‘We can abandon all the stuff here, as long as it’s tucked away in the pillbox. There’s no reason why it should ever be found. Not soon enough to matter, anyway. Just let’s do it fast.’
They trotted up to the pillbox together. Pritchard and Quinn gathered up the few bits of camping gear that were scattered outside, while Fong put on his motorcycle helmet and went inside. A minute later he reappeared, guiding Kiley. The American walked unsteadily, roused from an uncomfortable sleep, the chain that had been used to hold him now locked round his wrist, the gunnysack over his head again. Fong unbuttoned his helmet and tossed it aside.
‘What the hell now?’ Kiley mumbled, his words muffled by the sacking. He was still wearing the suit in which he’d been kidnapped, now rumpled and filthy.
‘We’re taking you on a little boat trip, is all,’ Quinn said. ‘Just you be good and you won’t come to no harm.’
‘There’s a storm brewing up out there, isn’t there?’ Kiley had heard and smelt the change in the weather from inside the pillbox. ‘Are you going to take a boat out in that?’
‘Ain’t none of your fucking business,’ Quinn said. ‘You just keep right on thinking how lucky you are to be alive, man.’
Fong and Quinn, walking on either side of Kiley, led him down to the sampan while Pritchard carried into the pillbox the last of the gear that had been left outside, the things that might be spotted from the air: the chemical toilet, the gas stove, the coffee pot and plastic mugs. The last thing he did was dig down with his hands into the sand at one of the outside corners of the building and disinter the Webley revolver and its cartridges, still sealed intact in the oilskin.
He had made sure, on the last visit here yesterday morning, that nobody had seen him bury the package. When it came to dictating terms—or, at worst, curbing rebellion—the man with authority was the man who held the weapon. He stood up, clutching the package, and ran down to the sampan.
